


the art of fine print

by lyricalecho



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 07:06:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4295295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricalecho/pseuds/lyricalecho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>your errors, enumerated: forgotten boundaries, miscalculations, wilson fisk, wilson fisk, wilson fisk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the art of fine print

**Author's Note:**

> so, wesley happened to me. to the surprise of absolutely no one, given that i spent LITERAL YEARS discussing "what if kyoya otori................................... WAS EVIL" and then daredevil was kind enough to give me that, in canon, so here we are. with 2k of absolute stream-of-consciousness second-person garbage, which is also unsurprising. someday i'll write a fic where anything happens, to anybody, at all, but today is not that day! tomorrow does not look good either.
> 
> blame goes to ao3 user meltokyo, whose matt/foggy kidnapping fic this was at least partially written in retaliation to, and who also dove headfirst with me into daredevil hell and did not look back. title comes from the first verse of "whatever you want" by vienna teng, a story about a very similar character with a very different ending, but it was Too Good for me to avoid using. anyways. enjoy this, if it's your bag!! if not then maybe you'll enjoy it anyways, who knows.

There are some things you look for in the people you work with: a certain degree of self-control is one of them.

It’s not that you can’t understand the motivations of someone who thinks differently than you do, because you’ve nearly made a career out of understanding people, and honestly the less someone thinks about their actions the more predictable they are. But it’s exhausting. It’s why you’ve grown to abhor working with the Russians, their impulses, their single-minded definition of what constitutes loyalty. Attention to detail isn’t just less of a risk—you know about risk—but it’s far less of a headache.

Maybe this will explain something as to how you came to be faced with the conundrum of Wilson Fisk.

There’s a deliberation to him; anyone could tell that just from the slow, severe precision with which he chooses his words. He isn’t a man to make choices lightly. But the other thing that’s obvious from the beginning, at least to you, is that this isn’t a natural state of being so much as a carefully cultivated balancing act, because as soon as he ceases controlling himself he’s in danger of being consumed by his rage, or—something else. There’s some part of him that’s all raw, unfocused anger, all restless emotion, and it’s never that far from coming into the light.

He’s all conviction, too, which is something else that should’ve stayed you. Convictions make for powerful leaders, but also vulnerable ones. Take down a belief and you can take down someone who believes in it. (Believing in nothing, on the other hand—well. You prefer not to claim hyperboles for yourself, but in this case they may be true.) But Fisk believes, maybe believes more than anyone you’ve ever met, in the power of a filthy, uncontrollable city you’ve long stopped seeing a future for.

According to the rules by which you live your life, Wilson Fisk never should have been a factor. And yet: here you are.

Something must have happened. Or, at least, that’s the appropriate conclusion to draw; you’re just not sure if you could reach it yourself. It’s hard to pin down anything to a specific moment, harder still when you’re the one remembering it. You knew his name from the beginning—that’s something Leland, at least, has asked you, in one of his rare forays into being interested in other people, but you suspect he already knew the answer. So, yes, that’s a pivot point, maybe, but it comes as less of a revealing and more of a cordoning off.

“Wesley,” he says, about two years into you knowing each other, the same measured tone, the same broken silence.

“Sir?”

“I feel like it would be best—” He sounds like he’s coming up with this as he goes, but you know ( _you_ know) he’s been thinking about what to say for this entire car ride, and possibly for months. “—if, from now on, you could avoid using my name in our dealings.”

And just like that: Wilson Fisk is closed off, someone known only to the two of you.

“I understand that this will put you as substantially more risk than it does me,” he continues, “and I would like to assure you that was not my intention, but I—”

“It’s quite alright, sir,” you say, as he looks towards you. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t understand the risks.”

He nods. You accept this. You accept a lot of things, for him.

Maybe it’s that, the point where he asks you to serve as the sole gate to who he is, that leads you to commit yourself wholly to something you never should have agreed to in the first place—that, or what comes after.

It’s about six months later, as he’s about to go off to wherever he goes at the same time every week. You’ve never asked him about it, because you’ve understood that it’s not the kind of thing you ask about if your relationship were to continue—and although you’ve moved from “curious” to “invested” through some pathway you can’t place you’ve always wanted this relationship to continue.

“Wesley,” he says, holding in the doorway as he’s about to leave. “I would—appreciate it if you came with me.”

You nod once, as you’re already moving to follow him, like muscle memory but with the illusion of control. It isn’t an order. There’s still no chance you would say no.

His deliberate silence follows both of you for the whole ride—you do not ask, and do not ask, and still do not ask as you both pull up outside a massive gated building and he says, “Wait in the car,” and leaves, even though it is by far the most absurd you have ever felt.

This continues, in the same manner, for six months, you alone in the car every week for at least an hour. It feels like a test, which you feel like should be well out of your job description at this point, although you’re frustrated because you still want to succeed.

You also know, unfortunately, that he wouldn’t see a test the same way that other people would. If he wants to know something, it’s because it’s something he needs to know.

One of the nights, after six months, he steps out of the car and gestures for you to follow. You end up past a delicate staircase and down a cozily lit hallway, at which point he reaches a door and says, “Wait here, please.”

You stand outside the door, habit accruing you to treat every passing sound as a threat until it’s safely gone, until he comes out and you walk to the car without another word.

You are not an uncritical person. You understand what is most likely happening here—or, at least, you understand the relatively limited range of possibilities. You could say something to him. You don’t.

Maybe the test is for you, rather than him.

Another six months, and then one day he opens the door and gestures for you to enter ahead of him.

“Wesley,” he says, “this is my mother.”

And: of course it is.

The woman seated in front of both of you has a certain grace to her, the air of someone whose inherent loveliness was pushed aside by circumstance before it ever really had a chance; you begin to file this away, and stop, and let it settle.

“Mother,” Fisk says with a little more clarity. “This is my friend, James Wesley.”

You hold out your hand as she stands slowly to take it. “It’s an honor,” you say, and you kiss her knuckles, once. She laughs more charmingly than her son has ever done anything.

“Ignore him, Mother,” says Fisk, almost startled but mostly wry. “He’s an incorrigible flirt.”

“He’s a darling,” she says, and turns back to Fisk. “How have you been, dear?”

When you walk with him to the door of his building hours later, when you have steeled yourself against absorbing every detail of what happened, he stares at the door and then turns to you, slowly.

“Wesley, I—” he says, and then reaches out, as if on some long-buried impulse, and takes your wrist gently. “Thank you.”

It’s not the first time he said it, and it will not be the last, but somehow everything crystallizes into this moment: you, and his hand on your wrist, and Wilson Fisk’s tenderness as improbable and necessary as his rage.

“…Of course, sir,” you say, and he nods and lets go.

You’re holding your own wrist as you step into the car and close the door behind you, and you count your breaths until you can forget the sensation.

And maybe that was the tipping point, and maybe you should know—you would usually know—but everything is slow and off-balance that you don’t realize until long after that night that everything that used to be about you taking note of things has become you, knowing. You do not calculate. With everything else, you calculate, but with him, you move on instinct, on unschooled reflex, on some awakening part of you responding to everything about him that initially should have warned you away.

This, too, is dangerous. There are rules against this, somewhere, but the rules stop at his hand on your wrist and the catch in his voice when he tells you about something like the woman who owns the art gallery—“Vanessa,” soft, distant, staring at his fingers pressed into his palm.

That’s the knowing, there, the push-pull of shared names, the things he keeps closest and then turns over to you. It’s more than you should ever have. It’s more than you asked for, to be sure, but you’re long years late from turning away.

(She’s someone you could have worked with without hesitation, you think, fluid and adaptable and that bone-deep serenity at her core—you almost ask if she, too, wonders how she ended up here, but then she seems to face this with far more certainty than you had, at the beginning.)

You understand what you know, and you understand that it goes beyond him appointing you the keeper of his name as well as his greatest secret. These things are essentially ceremonial, in comparison to what you know. He allows you them as a way to access all of him, every driving and uncontrolled and fearful impulse that nearly drove you away at first; and in exchange you integrate these things into the core of your being, until you can speak to them without thinking.

You have never before spoken to anything without thinking.

It’s the knowing, of course it is, that leads you to track down Karen Page. This is a poor decision. You know this; it’s never been in your job description to follow through on poor decisions. You should alert him, allow the full wrath of those deepest rages to fall upon her and eliminate all risk—but it would leave something furious and damaged and irreparable, and you think of that, and you cannot allow it. You will not allow that for him. The thought grabs at your limbs and leaves you unmoored, Fisk hurt and afraid for the only person he—

—but, no, that’s unfair. You know the people he’s allowed into his life; you’re the one who has no room for anyone but him.

Personal, then. You bring Karen Page to a warehouse, and you will make this personal. It’s something you never would have done before and still haven’t, for yourself; it’s something that distracts from your objective and usually ends in tragedy; it’s something Wilson Fisk would do without hesitation.

_Conviction_ , you think privately, as you sit and face the frightened, steely girl on the other side of the table. He believes in a city and you believe in him believing—so maybe the two of you aren’t that different, after all. Maybe you were always meant to end up here, in denial of every rule you’ve ever taught yourself, crossing every line you’ve ever drawn. Maybe knowing is worth more than anything you’ve ever learned; or maybe you’re a nameless piece in the life of someone who is going to change the world. There is peace in that, you think, for the first time, but it rings true.

You place the gun on the table.

This, then, as all things, for him.


End file.
